Presently, consumers typically obtain business phone numbers using a traditional, large and cumbersome “yellow-pages” phonebook. A consumer browses through the phonebook looking for the category of business that the consumer desires. After locating the category, the consumer selects one or more businesses from the listings provided in the category. The consumer then manually dials the number of the selected business. This inefficient process, therefore, requires many steps for the consumer to contact a business.
Businesses pay fees to have their phone numbers listed in the yellow-pages phonebooks. Many businesses pay additional fees to include an advertisement in the phonebook that is designed to increase the chances that the consumer will select their business. Businesses often incur substantial costs to pay a professional advertising agency to design their ad. The only way that a business can measure whether their advertisements, and hence the additional fees and costs, generate phone calls is to directly ask consumers that call them how they were referred to their business. This is a cumbersome, inefficient and unreliable approach.